


like a curse, in reverse

by goodboots



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Taako and Lucretia talk about Wonderland, Wonderland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:34:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22154686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodboots/pseuds/goodboots
Summary: Lucretia and Taako talk about Wonderland, and Kalen, and Magnus, and themselves. It goes OK.
Relationships: Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone), Magnus Burnsides/The Director | Lucretia
Comments: 3
Kudos: 43





	like a curse, in reverse

**Author's Note:**

> Addendum: locking all my fic to the archive. My little sis just disclosed that she knows my username and I (a 30 yr old lady) am quaking over here. Protect ur fannish identities, kids.

Lucretia shows up at his front door during his third week in the new loft.

She shouldn’t have been able to get past the wards around the perimeter, let alone make it through the front door, but hell, whatever, she’s Lucretia, it’s not like he’s surprised that she’s stomping all over his clearly defined boundaries.

He’s a little surprised she has the gall to just enter, appearing in the entryway without even the rift-opening pomp-and-circumstance Kravitz and the ghoul squad maintain. She could at least announce herself with some style. Better yet:

"Knocking is a thing," Taako informs her blandly.

It’s ten in the morning, but it’s his first day off in weeks from all the magic school planning with Ren, and he’s revelling in the sudden lack of paperwork. He’d slept in until 9 and then puttered around in his ratty old bathrobe, alternating between tidying up and getting distracted by half-unpacked boxes scattered everywhere, lingering remnants of the move-in that never seems to be finished.

"You wouldn’t have answered," Lucretia returns, blithe but smiling. Oh, that’s a creepy flashback. He hasn’t seen her smile directly at him since probably Candlenights back at the Bureau; it's unsettling.

"True, but that’s not a license to stage a home invasion." He squints at her, trying to figure out what's different. She looks weird?

He hasn't seen her since the housewarming, months ago. That had been a surprise. 

#

"Are you fucking kidding me," Taako had said when he first found out that was happening.

They were in Bottlenose Cove, ostensibly viewing the seaside bar Merle had impulse-bought, and Magnus had taken Merle and Taako aside and casually (excitedly) let them know that his and Lucretia’s on-again off-again thing from back on the Starblaster was, unbelievably, on again, and had been for some time now.

On the one hand: Taako was happy for his friend. Of course he was! Magnus was a good dude, and he deserved some happiness again, and he'd been hung up on herr for—god, for decades.

On the other hand: of all the people Magnus could choose to move on from his marriage, why in this plane or any other would he choose Lucretia? Taako was a firm believer in moving forward, and this was clearly twenty steps backward.

"Oh that's cool," Taako had said coldly. "You and the liar shackin' up, that's chill. You want us to keep a look out for memory loss in case she gets any smart ideas? Another voidfish stashed away somewhere?"

"That's not very nice," Merle said.

"Screw nice," Taako replied nastily. "She doesn't deserve nice."

It had taken Lup to get him to chill out about the whole thing. "For Magnus, Taako. He deserves some happiness." 

So he'd gone, he'd house-warmed with all their BoB pals, and he'd steadily avoided Lucretia the entire night. He'd been hoping to avoid seeing her another few weeks, at least, but no such luck. As ever, Madame Director barges in where she's not wanted.

#

She, for her part, seems all business, brisk and efficient as ever, like it's normal for the two of them to have a meeting in his front hallway:

"I have an urgent matter to discuss with you, Taako, and it couldn't wait for you to decide to return my calls."

He snorts. "So urgent that it involves housebreaking?"

"Yes, very urgent. An intervention is perhaps the best way of putting it."

"Yeah, that tracks. You just love intervening."

_Weird_ was the wrong word. It's her shadow, just slightly off, a faint blur around her edges. Has she done something to her aura?

"Only when necessary," she replies, steady.

He'd never have noticed it, but it's the shimmery after-affect that he can see every time he looks in the mirror these days: "You’re using Disguise Self."

She looks exactly the same as she did at the housewarming, except her frilly dress has been exchanged for practical leggings and a bias-cut jacket of sturdy canvas. Her bearing, once so foreboding back on the moon, has lightened.

She’s lost a bit of that distant authority that he associates with "Madame Director," and now that he knows it was all an act in the first place, not her natural disposition, he understands why. Magnus always did bring out the humour in her.

"You caught me," she says, unconcerned. "But that's not the point."

"The hell it isn't. Why are you using disguise self?"

She brushes him off with an exaggerated shrug, another crack in the armour of her demeanour. She shrugs now? What the fuck is going on here?

"This isn’t about me," she deflects. "I’m here for Magnus, and I need you to pass a message along to Kravitz, and—there are some other things you should know."

_For Magnus_ is the magic word that makes everybody stop their foolishness and pay attention these days, so he drops the line of questioning, and says, "Lay it on me, buttercup."

She sucks in a breath and says carefully, "Magnus remembers Governor Kalen."

Taako nearly drops his teacup.

_Oh Lucy_, he thinks, suddenly terrified, _what did you do?_

"How?" he finally manages to ask. "Those fucking Wonderland psychos were too fucking powerful, there’s no way to get back what they took. Merle and I both, we must’ve tried a hundred times to tell Maggie about Governor Fucknuts—"

"I do know," Lucretia interrupts gently, all in a rush, "he told me, once he was able. I’ve tried as well, though not as thoroughly as you two. You’re right, there’s nothing to break the magic, it’s not possible for Magnus to retain the knowledge of what Kalen did to him."

"If there were any way, we would have found it."

Her tone softens. "I know you would have. But you're right, it it holds too strong, nothing can shatter through. But Lydia and Edward are properly dead now, and without their will to sustain the curses made in Wonderland. They can't be broken, but with enough time and care, some of them they can be disassembled. The lesser ones, at any rate."

Curses. That's funny, he's encountered so many curses before over his long, long, let's-be-honest-probably-too-long life, but he hadn't ever thought of what happened to him in Wonderland as a curse. It was a removal; a surgical, precise stripping-away of something fundamental.

"Any you did this disassembling on your own, I take it?"

"I did. It was trial and error, and I didn’t want to begin by toying with Magnus’s memories—"

He starts to say it and she winces, preemptive, visibly upset at her own choice of words.

"I know," she preempts, "why stop now? But I digress."

“Not interested in apologies,” he says, which has become his standard response. He’s never actually said it directly to Lucretia before, usually he’s explaining to Lup that an “I’m sorry” isn’t good enough to make up for wiping his damn memory, but he’s got no qualms about telling her to her face what apologies are worth.

She doesn’t apologize, though. She doesn’t even try. She only says, “I know. And there’s nothing you can say to me I’ve not already told myself a thousand times, Taako. I’m not here to go over all that.”

“Thank fuck for that, but you better get explaining about Maggie. Taako’s got a tight schedule.”

Her lips twist, and Taako knows she's swallowing her initial reply, reformatting her words to avoid offending him. Good.

"The curses from Wonderland don’t function normally," she says, "because they weren’t static. They required Lydia and Edward's continued effort to maintain; that’s why they were so effective."

"Permanent," Taako adds.

"Well, as good as. They were so overpowered that even dead, they’d built enough momentum to fuel the curses indefinitely, thousands upon thousands of them, stacked up on top of each other like building blocks, piled up in the edges where the planes overlap. But it turns out you and I both have some experience with those places, and how to navigate them."

He runs his hand over his jaw, trying to wrap his mind around this idea, and then what she actually just said clicks into place. It's not just Disguise Self, is it?

"Take that off," he demands.

She heaves a deep breath, relieved. "Got there already, have you? That was quick."

He's furious. "Take it off, take it off right now, I'm the only person allowed to wear glamours in my own fucking house."

He sounds manic, he can hear the thin reedy strain of furious urgency in his voice, but she doesn't fight him on it.

"Taako—" she says.

"No, no no no no _no_, you fucking listen to me: take off your glamour right the fuck now, or I will never trust you even one fucking iota ever again, you feel me?"

And he watches as she acquiesces; as stately, brusque Madame Director unravels in a swirl of silver mist, and oh—god damn it, there she is.

He hates her.

He reminds himself of this fact, and tries to quash the hiccup in his heart at the sight of her. Little Lucy, slight and nervous, always hiding in the background with her books, avoiding everyone's eyes. Barely twenty the day the Starblaster left the homeworld.

There she is.

"Hot damn," Taako says, because that is some impressive fuckin' magic.

"I know you won't believe me," she says, in a higher lilting voice that sounds to him like a memory of a dream, and he reels back, "but I didn't do this for myself. Do you think I care about looking young, Taako?"

It occurs to him that she could've glamoured her youth back at any time—she was certainly powerful enough to do it, absolutely had the spell-slots to spare—but she just hadn't bothered. He’d not thought if that before. She could have looked any way she liked, and it’s not as if he and the boner squad would have recognized her through the Voidfish static anyway.

He points this out, while settling his teacup on the sideboard. She’s still standing in the entry, and that’s as far into his house as she’s going to get.

She scoffs. "I had better things to worry about than appearances."

"Yeah, your fancy-ass throne room suggests otherwise."

"Well—I had to be taken seriously, to run the Bureau. You must realize, I went to Wonderland just as I was starting work on it, and I wasn't particularly successful at finding investors or allies. Maureen Miller had political clout, but I was the face of the organization, and it turned out that having the face of a fifty-something woman was a greater help than my youth would've been."

He has to laugh at that one. "Bullshit, Lucy. Yeah, you were busy running the BoB, but you can't pretend you didn't miss your youth. Don't try to spin it as some great gift to the cause. You've always been such a martyr."

That last bit comes out sounding almost fond, and he cringes. She reacts even worse, and briefly looks on the verge of tears.

"I—" she swallows, starts over. "This was an accident. I don't care if you believe me, and I didn't come here to argue, but it's important that you know. I didn't go back to try to regain lost time or anything so stupid. I'm living on borrowed time." That must mean something to her, because she repeats it, and adds, "I should be dead a thousand times over."

"Well, you and me both," he replies. God, was she always this melodramatic? Probably. That might've been what he liked about her. "Anyway, thanks for the warning. I guess I should expect Maggie in here any day now, with some dumbass plan to go murderate Kalen. I'm in, obviously, so tell him that."

She shakes her head. "Kalen's already dead. He died when the Hunger came. Magnus may want your assistance with dismantling whatever's left of his organization, I'm not sure of his plans yet."

She pauses, and he thinks that's all she came here for, but then she says, "It wasn’t possible to reverse every curse from Wonderland. There were too many, the air was thick like smog, and I still don’t know how many people lost something there. But—"

Holy shit.

He says, "You're not serious."

She gives him a look that's not quite a smile, it's too sad for that, but the corners of her mouth are twisted with something like joy. “I wouldn't lie to you again, Taako."

"It's—"

He's too afraid to look, and he won't do it with her here.

He'll wait til she's gone, and retreat back to his bedroom, draw the curtains against the wall of windows and light the lamps and work up the nerve to stand in front of his vanity table un-glamoured and see if he looks like himself again.

"The message," she says, shaking him abruptly back to the conversation, "for Kravitz. I realize it's rude to expect you to deliver correspondence, but Magnus doesn't have his stone frequency."

"Do I need a pen and paper for this?"

She shakes her head. "Please alert him that I found—that Wonderland wasn't as empty as we'd thought. There's a cult taken up residence on the outskirts of territory, I didn't get very close but there were strong necromantic energies—I think Lydia and Edward might have acquired acolytes."

"What? How many?"

"Dozens, forty, maybe fifty people. He may well already know, but I thought it best—"

"Yeah, shit," he's already fishing his stone of farspeech out from the pocket of his robe. "I'll call him right now. I—do you want, like, tea? You can wait for him?"

He's losing his damn mind, he must be.

"No, thank you. I should get back to Magnus, I left him with the dogs but I don’t like him being alone too long, not when he’s had a shock.” She sounds worried, nervous, and he can hardly take his eyes off her even to key in Kravitz's frequency. It's fucking uncanny, seeing her like this, not aged a day from when they first boarded the Starblaster.

"Right, right, that’s… listen, wait here, I’m going to call Krav right now." He gropes around on the sideboard for a quill and sheaf of paper, shoving it at her as he dials. "Fuck it, changed my mind. Write down where you found them, I don’t wanna get it wrong."

She takes the pen from him and dutifully copies out the location and approximate numbers of the acolytes.

"Kravitz," Taako relays in an undertone as soon as the frequencies connect, “no time to chat, we’ve got a bit of a Reaper-adjacent situation."

He has no doubt that Lucy can hear him; he could stop her if he cared to. It means something that she keeps her eyes on him the whole time he’s on the stone, giving co-ordinates. It means something that she waits until he’s ended the call before she turns to leave, perfunctory, cloak swinging open over her unlaced boots.

She’s still so much younger than him. How stupid had he been, at her age?

"Lucretia," he grinds out, to stop her from going.

"Yes?"

"This is—like, we are not cool, you know that? This doesn’t settle things. This isn’t a pass."

She sighs again (lots of sighing today), but only says, "No, I hadn't imagined that it would."

#

Kravitz meets him and Barry outside the remains of Wonderland. Merle's busy with the kids, Lup has a check-in audience with the Raven Queen, Davenport's somewhere off the eastern seaboard, and Angus is—despite being increasingly competent with his decapitation spells—still an actual child.

So. Kravitz and Taako and Barry go to work. It's not like it would be romantic even if Barry weren't there; they're all up to their lives in slaughtered necromancer, the gore isn't particularly sexy.

Lucretia, who shows up 10 minutes late and without being specifically invited, is less precise. Taako imagines it’s been a while since she’s had to get her hands dirty, but clearly she’d burned her slots for the day, because she has one of Maggie’s smaller axes and is going to town with it.

"That was fun," he says, once the last acolytes are dead or subdued. Fuck, but he hates cultists. They’re just so creepy.

"Was it?" Lucretia asks.

"Yeah. Um, hey, afterparty at my place. For dinner. You can,you know, tell Mangus. And he can bring you if he wants. His call, no big to me either way."

"Dinner?" she says.

"Dinner?" Kravitz echoes, "but I thought—" and goes silent when Barry forcefullyshushes him and drags him a few feet further away. 

Fuck, you know things are awkward when Barold Bluejeans is the one upholding social niceties.

"Yeah," Taako says, come by for 8. I’ll make macarons for desert."

He doesn’t forgive her yet, not at all, but she’s trying. He doesn’t forgive her; but suddenly it’s not impossible that he ever will. 


End file.
